Byline: SCOTT GUTIERREZ, HECTOR CASTRO AND LISE OLSEN P-I reporters
A woman and child whose remains were discovered 20 years ago in three Northwest rivers have been identified from DNA samples submitted by relatives, the Cowlitz County Sheriff's Office reported Tuesday.
But police have been unable to find the victims' husband and father, who investigators now know disappeared about the time the victims were found.
Police were able to identify the bodies after relatives, including the woman's brother in Sydney, Australia, came forward after reading about the case in a Seattle P-I investigative report about unsolved deaths in Washington. The series, "Without a Trace," revealed flaws in how missing-persons and unidentified-body cases are handled and tracked.
A fisherman found Raj Narain's torso in the Lewis River south of Kelso on Sept. 11, 1987. A few days later, her legs were found in the Willamette River in Portland. That Sept. 24, a fisherman found the toddler's body - clothed in a striped pink playsuit and cotton diaper - floating in the Cowlitz River near the confluence with the Columbia River.
But the search continues for Ashok Kumar Narain, who has not been seen since several months after his wife, 24, and their 14-month-old daughter, Kamnee Koushal Narain, disappeared, the Sheriff's Office reported.
Detectives from the Sheriff's Office and police in Eugene, Ore., where the Fiji islanders were living in 1987, have been searching for Ashok Narain for a year, following potential leads in Washington, Oregon and California, said Chief Criminal Deputy Charlie Rosenzweig, one of the deputies who retrieved the bodies from the water. Investigators are uncertain if Narain is a victim or if he has knowledge of the slayings.
"We're hoping to locate him, and we're hoping when we do, it will help us answer more questions that we have," he said.
Authorities said Tuesday that several detectives exchanged the case over the years, each time trying to "breathe new life" into it. Then a relative came forward in April 2006.
Raj Narain's brother, Jai "Bobby" Prasad, who resides in Sydney, saw the P-I story about the two unsolved deaths on a night in April 2006 and was struck by a forensic artist's sketch that recreated the infant girl's face. It resembled miniature portraits his sister had sent of his niece. He found a number for the Kelso Police Department, which also was investigating.
"The story was so amazing. There was a breakthrough coming in. I wasn't sleeping that night," he told the P-I.
Prasad said Tuesday he was looking for his sister, using Internet resources, faxes and phone calls, for several years.
"I started tracing the case in 2004," he said.
Raj Narain was a Fijian-born Indian from a family of 11.
The youngest of the family, she was the first to leave Fiji, in 1984.
The couple lived in an apartment in Eugene, and their daughter was born in June 1985. She sent letters to her brothers and audiotapes to her mother, who could not read or write. Then, the family stopped hearing from her. Her disappearance went unreported.
The victims likely were slain just a few days before they were discovered, Rosenzweig said Tuesday. When authorities were unable to identify them, they were buried in unmarked graves in a cemetery near Kelso.
Prasad, who has known about his sister's identification for months but did not discuss it before Tuesday at the police's request, is preparing a trip to the U.S. to exhume his sister's body, hold a brief ceremony and take her and her daughter home to her native Fiji.
However, Prasad said he has not gotten the letters from the authorities, the death certificate or other information that he needs to proceed from the Cowlitz County Coroner's Office.
Ashok Narain's brother, Robert Narayan of Woodland, Calif., also called Kelso police in 2006 and said his brother had been missing since April 1988 and that his brother's wife and daughter also had vanished, Rosenzweig said. Narayan said his call was prompted by his discovery in an Internet search of the article published by the P-I.
DNA evidence and samples obtained from the victims' relatives were sent to the University of North Texas, where forensic scientists were able to confirm the mother and daughter were related to Raj Narain's siblings, Rosenzweig said.
Detectives found several people named Ashok Narain during their search through three states, but none was the person detectives are looking for. They've interviewed friends and co-workers, looking for him, Rosenzweig said. He is now listed in the National Crime Information Center database as a missing person.
"We track him in the Eugene area through the spring of 1988, a few months after the murders. Then, all indications are that he disappeared and we really don't know why," Rosenzweig said.
Lise Olsen, now a reporter at the Houston Chronicle, first reported this case as part of the P-I series, "Without a Trace." Find it online at seattlepi.com/missing.
P-I reporter Scott Gutierrez
can be reached at 206-903-5396
or scottgutierrez@seattlepi.com.
